So far, so good… Â I had an issue with a Western Digital External Firewire 400 Mybook 500Gb drive… Â After a few days, it would seemingly “go to sleep” and not always wake up properly for a Time Machine Backup…
Time Machine would start processing, but continue on indefinitely, and would get “stuck” in the backup… Â Cancelling would not stop it, I would have to manually remove the drive from the FW chain, causing the system to abort the backup….
That drive has now been moved to the END of the Firewire chain, and so far this issue has not yet re-appeared…. Â And it’s been roughly a week….
So, if you have Firewire issues, try moving devices around in the chain…